fed to him,--"rare! nay, how common--I don't
say to the extent of forgery and fraud, but to the extent of degradation
and ruin--is the greed of a Little More to those who have The Enough! is
the discontent with competence, respect, and love, when catching sight
of a money-bag! How many well-descended county families, cursed with
an heir who is called a clever man of business, have vanished from the
soil! A company starts, the clever man joins it one bright day. Pouf!
the old estates and the old name are powder. Ascend higher. Take nobles
whose ancestral titles ought to be to English ears like the sound of
clarions, awakening the most slothful to the scorn of money-bags and
the passion for renown. Lo! in that mocking dance of death called
the Progress of the Age, one who did not find Enough in a sovereign's
revenue, and seeks The Little More as a gambler on the turf by the
advice of blacklegs! Lo! another, with lands wider than his greatest
ancestors ever possessed, must still go in for The Little More, adding
acre to acre, heaping debt upon debt! Lo! a third, whose name, borne by
his ancestors, was once the terror of England's foes,--the landlord of
a hotel! A fourth,--but why go on through the list? Another and another
still succeeds; each on the Road to Ruin, each in the Age of Progress.
Ah, Miss Travers! in the old time it was through the Temple of Honour
that one passed to the Temple of Fortune. In this wise age the process
is reversed. But here comes your father."

"A thousand pardons!" said Leopold Travers. "That numskull Mondell kept
me so long with his old-fashioned Tory doubts whether liberal politics
are favourable to agricultural prospects. But as he owes a round sum to
a Whig lawyer I had to talk with his wife, a prudent woman; convinced
her that his own agricultural prospects were safest on the Whig side of
the question; and, after kissing his baby and shaking his hand, booked
his vote for George Belvoir,--a plumper."

"I suppose," said Kenelm to himself, and with that candour which
characterized him whenever he talked to himself, "that Travers has taken
the right road to the Temple, not of Honour, but of honours, in every
country, ancient or modern, which has adopted the system of popular
suffrage."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE next day Mrs. Campion and Cecilia were seated under the veranda.
They were both ostensibly employed on two several pieces of embroidery,
one intended for a screen, the other for a so